Nvidia is playing matchmaker, trying to connect companies with its graphics processing units to data-center operators that have the capacity to deploy them in the Nordics, sources have told CNBC.

While Nvidia has established an effective monopoly over the most powerful AI chips, it has worked to exert greater influence across the AI ecosystem as the race to build infrastructure accelerates. That reach extends through its software stack, relationships with governments and direct investments in other companies.

The chip giant has also sought a role in AI infrastructure deals. Two sources familiar with the matter have told CNBC that Nvidia has offered to introduce companies with data centers in the Nordics, an increasingly sought-after AI infrastructure region, to firms with its GPUs that are in the market for capacity.

The sources asked to remain anonymous when discussing private information.

Gigawatts of data-center capacity are due to be built in the Nordics in the coming years, thanks to access to power and abundant land. Neoclouds and hyperscalers including Nebius and Microsoft have inked deals in the region in 2026.

One source said that Nvidia had reached out to a data-center company, sounding out potential offtakers: customers that commit to buying or leasing computing capacity.

This is part of what Nvidia sees as its “value proposition to GPU customers,” the source said, adding that the chip giant “often” didn’t name the companies on whose behalf it was reaching out.

The other source told CNBC that Nvidia had also made introductions between a company building AI infrastructure and those with GPUs in the U.S. and Asia. Nvidia is “helping make sure people who have money and demand for GPUs also have data center space,” they added.

Nvidia did not respond to a request for comment from CNBC.

The company typically sells its chips to original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs, which then build them into racks and servers before selling them on. But it often has relationships with the companies buying the end product.

Pure DC said in July it would invest 1.5 billion euros ($1.74 billion) to build a 110 MW campus in Finland, with the potential to scale beyond 550 MW. Arcem has plans for a site with up to 500 MW of capacity. In March, Nebius unveiled plans to build one of…

A small town in southern Finland has turned to the world’s largest commercial sand battery to fix what many see as the most critical problem facing renewable energy: intermittency.

Standing at 13 meters tall and 15 meters wide, the eye-catching facility uses 2,000 metric tons of crushed soapstone to store clean energy in the form of heat to provide 100 megawatt-hours of thermal energy.

That’s enough to provide the 5,000 residents of Pornainen with nearly one month of heat demand through the summer — and roughly one week of demand in the winter.

Commissioned by Finnish district heating company Loviisan Lämpö and developed by Polar Night Energy, the giant sand battery launched last year as part of a push to introduce a flexible heat production technology and reduce carbon emissions generated by the local district heating network.

Polar Night Energy said the project is estimated to have slashed greenhouse gas emissions from the heating network by almost 70% and reduced the use of wood chips by about 60%. An existing wood-chip power plant remains in operation as a backup and peak-load facility.

Tommi Eronen, CEO of Polar Night Energy, said Pornainen had previously relied on burning oil and wood chips for its heating needs — but the town’s sand battery was now able to provide combustion-free heating for the majority of the year.

“We’re changing from a world where big power plants were doing the energy production to where solar and wind are producing the energy, then we need a massive amount of storage,” Eronen told CNBC on a video call.

“Hopefully a big portion of those storages could be sand battery-type of storages where we don’t need rare earth materials, like in many chemical batteries, such as lithium-ion batteries.”

The Pornainen project is about 10 times larger than an earlier version launched in the country in 2022, reinforcing the potential for sand batteries to play a more prominent role in cutting emissions both domestically and abroad.

Battery storage is widely expected to play a pivotal role in the energy transition — and sand batteries in particular have shown promise for regional heat storage, but scaling up this technology faces significant hurdles. Some notable criticisms include their ability to efficiently convert heat back to electricity and their relatively low energy density compared to traditional batteries.

Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda on Thursday said the Baltic country’s top political leaders had agreed that a constitutional ban on the domestic deployment of nuclear weapons should be removed.

The decision comes shortly after lawmakers in Finland, another NATO member that shares a border with Russia, voted to lift its longstanding ban on nuclear weapons.

Speaking to reporters shortly after the decision, Nauseda said Article 137 of Lithuania’s constitution had become “outdated” and “obsolete,” according to a report from state broadcaster LRT.

He added that parliamentary and government leaders were “practically unanimous” in their support for removing the policy — as opposed to amending it — and that it would have been “truly unfortunate” if Lithuania had become the weak link within NATO.

Lithuania’s Article 137 had explicitly prohibited the deployment of weapons of mass destruction and the establishment of foreign military bases on Lithuanian territory.

“The geopolitical situation is getting worse. Our constitution was written when geopolitical circumstances were totally different,” Nauseda said, according to Reuters.

The removal of the provision means Vilnius can adapt to evolving security circumstances in the future, Nauseda said. He added, however, that there were no immediate plans to store nuclear weapons in the country.

Lithuania, which borders the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, has been one of Ukraine’s staunchest allies during Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s more than four-year conflict with Kyiv, providing extensive military equipment and financial support.

The Financial Times reported last month, citing three unnamed sources briefed on discussions, that the U.S. was in talks to secure new nuclear-capable deployments in Europe.

The report said countries on NATO’s eastern flank, such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, were interested in potentially hosting bases for so-called U.S. dual-capable aircraft (DCA), which are able to deliver nuclear strikes.

Russia on Thursday launched a large-scale missile and drone attack against Ukraine, targeting military, fuel and energy complexes in Kyiv and other regions across the country.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said via Telegram that there had been at least 13 deaths in Ukraine’s capital following the attacks, with July 3 declared as a day of mourning for the city.

Some of Russia’s neighbors took emergency measures in response to the attack. Finland temporarily imposed an “aviation restriction zone” in…

Russia launched a large-scale missile and drone attack on Ukraine Thursday, targeting Kyiv and other regions across the country.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said that it carried out a “massive strike using long-range precision air, land, and sea-based weapons and attack drones.”

Moscow said the strikes targeted military-industrial facilities, fuel and energy complexes in Kyiv and the Kyiv region, as well as military airfields in the Dnipropetrovsk, Poltava, Cherkasy and Chernihiv regions.

“Kyiv is under attack from ballistic missiles and UAVs,” Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Telegram, adding that there were 10 deaths and 34 injured.

It was not immediately clear how many missiles and drones were launched at Ukraine, or how many Ukraine had managed to intercept.

Finland had temporarily imposed an “aviation restriction zone” in the eastern Gulf of the country before lifting it.

Poland also scrambled fighter jets in response to the attack, saying on X that “fighter jets have begun operating, while ground-based air defense systems and radar reconnaissance have reached a state of readiness.”

“These actions are of a preventive nature and are aimed at securing and protecting the airspace, especially in areas adjacent to the threatened regions,” it added.

Olga Stefanishyna, Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S., said on X that residents spent the night in shelters. Kyiv was seeing fires and the destruction of residential buildings in several districts of the city, she said

CNBC has reached out to Russia’s defense ministry for comment.

Moscow’s strikes came after Ukraine said Tuesday that it had hit one of Russia’s largest satellite communications centers for a second time in just over a week, CNN reported.

Kyiv has stepped up long-range drone attacks inside Russia, targeting oil refineries, military facilities and major cities, including Moscow and St Petersburg.

“As envisaged by the Defense Strategy of Ukraine, we are depriving the enemy of resources for waging war,” the ministry said on Telegram on July 1, adding that the effort is intended to pressure Russia to end the war, now in its fourth year.

HELSINKI, Finland — Iran’s influence over the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz has inadvertently transformed the energy security debate, effectively casting fossil fuels rather than renewables as the primary source of vulnerability.

For decades, the conventional narrative has been one in which renewables were criticized for their intermittency issues and dependence on weather conditions, whereas technologies such as coal, oil, and gas were seen as providing security.

The Middle East conflict and protracted closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway that typically handles around 20% of the world’s global oil and liquefied natural gas supplies, have reframed this debate, however, laying bare the risks associated with fragile fossil fuel supply chains.

Energy experts and the CEOs of Nordic energy giants Fortum and Statkraft made this point clear on the sidelines of the Eurelectric Power Summit in the Finnish capital this week.

“I mean, the big mantras, and I’m surprised we haven’t heard people talking about this yet, is that fossil fuels are now intermittent and uncertain, which, of course, was the argument levelled against renewables,” Kingsmill Bond, energy strategist at U.K.-based think tank Ember, told CNBC in Helsinki.

“Renewables, thanks to batteries, have become actually pretty constant given the sun rises every morning. So, look I think we have moved to a new environment and … we are still far too exposed to the old system – and we need to change, particularly in Europe, we need to change really quickly.”

Bond said the current energy shock marks the first time in history where policymakers have a superior alternative technology to turn to for security, comparing the situation today to the 1973 and 1979 oil crises.

“If you go back to the 1970s, what did we do? We built nuclear, but that took 10 years and it was expensive. This time round, we’ve got solar and wind, batteries and electrification and lots of flexible technologies, which are huge and cheap and we can scale them. And that’s what’s happening,” Bond said.

The U.S. and Israeli-led war against Iran has rattled global energy markets and triggered widespread inflation fears, with Asia’s reliance on imported energy sitting at the forefront of the global fossil fuel crisis.

Supply disruptions have also hit hard in Europe and Africa, where countries are responding to rising fuel costs and a considerable threat to food security. With no imminent reopening of the Strait of Hormuz in sight, the situation has prompted many to reflect on the extent to which the world remains deeply reliant on fossil fuel trade routes.

Asked about intermittency concerns regarding imported fossil fuels, Fortum CEO Markus Rauramo said, “It’s a different kind of intermittency but absolutely. So,…

HELSINKI, Finland — Finnish President Alexander Stubb has outlined his vision for a much larger European Union, saying the 27-nation bloc needs to “think big” and seize the moment to project power on the global stage.

Speaking at an energy conference in the Finnish capital on Wednesday, Stubb said the EU should push to increase its membership to 40 states and named the U.K., Canada, Turkey, Norway and Iceland as potential candidates to join.

His comments come as the Trump administration’s actions, alongside Russia’s war with Ukraine, prompt some countries to reconsider the benefits of EU membership.

Stubb told the Eurelectric Power Summit that “the window of opportunity” for EU enlargement “is quite short because when the war in Ukraine ends and perhaps when the U.S. administration changes, I don’t know, then people are going to take their foot off the gas pedal and start heckling about unnecessary stuff again.”

Stubb added that “European strategic autonomy or European geopolitical power” is “often based on size and scale and I think the best European policy ever has been European enlargement.”

“In this moment, we need to think big and geographically, we need to enlarge or at least create memberships which are flexible enough to bring in a sum total of 40 European states — or even non-European,” Stubb said.

The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.

The EU is pursuing its largest enlargement in a generation, with nine candidate countries all eyeing entry to the bloc over the coming years. Montenegro and Albania are seen as the frontrunners among the Western Balkans, while Ukraine and Moldova are moving closer to opening formal membership talks.

Finland’s president said the EU should look to its western flank and bring the U.K., which left the bloc in 2020, back into the fold, or at least “as close as possible.”

Canada should be considered as another option, Stubb said. “Wouldn’t it be lovely if Canada was the 28th state of the European Union rather than the 51st state of the United States?”

U.S. President Donald Trump has touted his ambitions of annexing Canada. In a Truth Social post earlier in the week, Trump wrote “51st state!” while sharing a Bloomberg news article about Canada entering a technical recession for the first time since 2020.

Finland’s Kone has agreed to buy German rival TK Elevator in a deal valued at 29.4 billion euros ($34.4 billion), marking one of Europe’s biggest takeover agreements in recent years.

The cash and share agreement, which had been rumored in recent days, would create the world’s largest elevator maker, overtaking rivals such as U.S.-based Otis and Switzerland’s Schindler.

Kone said the deal would result in estimated synergies of 700 million euros on an annual run-rate basis.

“For over a century, both KONE and TKE have successfully developed their businesses, in tandem with an urbanizing world. By uniting, we are laying the foundation for an even more innovative company, well positioned for long-term success,” Kone CEO Philippe Delorme said in a statement.

Kone shareholders holding just over 40% of all outstanding shares and approximately 74.3% of total votes have agreed to support the deal, the company said.

TK Elevator CEO Uday Yadav said the two companies share a “deep respect” as he welcomed the announcement.

“Together we will bring the very best of both companies to our customers, our people, and the cities we serve. The best of our story lies ahead,” Yadav said.

Shares of German steel company Thyssenkrupp surged 14% on the news. TK Elevator became an independent company after separating from Thyssenkrupp in 2020. Private equity firms Advent and Cinven bought TK Elevator for around 17 billion euros at the time.

The proposed merger is expected to face industry scrutiny, with Schindler telling Reuters late last month that it was prepared to challenge any such deal before antitrust authorities.

28-year-old Rebecca Zhou, born in China’s Sichuan province, owns an assortment of Moomin merchandise — bags, mugs, and figurines featuring the white hippo-looking cartoon character from Finland — that she has accumulated over the years.

By her own admission, many of these purchases may seem “childish”, but “it is [just] nice to treat yourself to something fun, even if it is not the most value-for-money,” Zhou said.

Zhou is not alone. Data from analysts and official sources show that Chinese consumers are increasingly spending on goods and experiences chosen for their emotional resonance over practical value — everything from theme parks to jewelry.

But what may once have been a fairly unsurprising consumer impulse is now being taken seriously by China’s business leaders and policymakers.

China’s “emotional economy” first entered into public discourse in 2024, after a craze over Pop Mart‘s Labubu figurines appeared to signal shifts in Chinese consumer behavior, where a consumer group once characterized by norms of frugality and pragmatism appeared just as willing to splurge on self-indulgence.

“People are not just buying things,” said Ashley Dudarenok, founder of digital consultancy ChoZan told CNBC in a phone call. “They’re buying feelings, they’re buying identity, they’re buying a sense of connection.”

Over the recent Chinese New Year holiday, data from ChoZan shows that consumers spent significantly less on traditional staples like festive food gifts (known as nian huo), and more on unconventional expenses, like travel experiences and cosmetics compared to the same period in 2023.

“What people used to buy back in the day, like liquor and bulk nuts … were all about social obligations and tradition. Right now, people buy gift boxes, they buy designer toys … and people don’t frown upon that,” Dudarenok said.

This shift from obligatory to more discretionary spending over China’s largest holiday exemplified broader shifts in consumer norms, according to Dudarenok, with Chinese consumers increasingly looking to satisfy desires for personal fulfillment, over more “rational” purchases.

Beyond the Chinese New Year season, a February report from DaXue Consulting also highlighted tangible goods like aromatherapy candles and cosmetics, as growing segments in China’s emotional economy.

One estimate from the iiMedia Research Center projected China’s emotional economy to exceed a valuation of 4.5 trillion yuan ($655 billion) by 2029 — almost double its value in 2024 — as Chinese consumers seek ever-increasing “emotional relief and spiritual satisfaction”.